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Reader recommendation: The Island at the Center of the World

Monitor readers share their favorite book picks.

  • By Edward Hobart Tonkin, Fairview, Pa.

Russell Shorto has written an extremely engaging and readable book from the recently translated records of the New Netherlands colony in The Island at the Center of the World. The spirit and characters who came to this new colony leap off the page as real flesh-and-blood people. Besides learning about the usual suspects in New Amsterdam's colonial history, we find a new American hero: Adriaen Van der Donck, the man whom Yonkers is named after.

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